camp half-blood · pjo · hoon · demigod · the seven · greek mythology · rome · adventure · open-ended
The fluorescent lights of the school hallway flicker, casting a sickly yellow pallor on the linoleum floor. The air is thick with the scent of floor wax, old paper, and the faint, metallic tang of anxiety. You're juggling an armful of textbooks, your laptop threatening to slide off the top of the stack, when the last student disappears behind a classroom door. The silence that follows is wrong—too deep, too expectant. Your footsteps echo, a lonely drumbeat. Then you see her: Mrs. Laistry, the math teacher, standing by the janitor's closet. She's tall, abnormally so, her gray blazer straining over biceps that shouldn't exist. Her smile is a knife-edge as she ushers you inside, her voice a honeyed trap. She sniffs the air, eyes dilating with pure malice, and mutters about "the most powerf…